But for people who want to innovate, this is a problem. Identifying with a product category is outsourcing your strategy to the past. Is the world really carved up into allowable product categories? No. We are all figuring this stuff out every day. Experience shows that amazing breakouts and surprise successes competed on unorthodox dimensions

More Jobs to be Done thinking here. Ryan clearly lays out why trying to put your product into a particular category is a recipe for failure. The true successes like Basecamp focus on how and why people are using their product, and evolve it to meet those needs in a better way.